I Finally Outdid Myself

Am I crazy, making ten pizzas in an afternoon when only one person was coming over for dinner? Well, yes and no. Ten pizzas is slight overkill, but I've got it down to a science.

For instance, making your own dough is a no-no, unless you plan on devoting an entire day to it (it's not hard to do, but it's time-consuming, not to mention messy).

I get mine ready made from the pizza place at Atwater market. For $4.50, you get enough dough to make four large (14") pizzas or six small (12") pizzas. It's great dough, with lots of air inside to give you that puffy wood-fired crust look.

So the key here is to do all the prep the day beforehand. I bought three different kinds of salami (they sell them whole in paper in various flavours these days in most supermarkets), Tuscany ham, kalamata olives, 6-year-old cheddar, Jarlsberg and Mozzarella di Bufala and added the usual suspects: red onion, red pepper, goat cheese, and to my intense joy/regret, two $6 heads of Ail de Provence (garlic from Provence, France. Watch it, it's the most powerful garlic on the planet and will make your whole refrigerator smell like a garlic buffet).

The next day, you bring out the dough to get it to room temp and you clear the battlefield. You preheat the oven at 550º for an hour with the pizza stone within. I recently bought an oven thermometer, the kind that has a wire that goes into the oven with a digital readout outside, and was disappointed to see that the oven never went any hotter than 489º no matter how long I preheated it, and when I started cooking, frequently fell below 350º. That meant that the stone didn't get hot enough to give a char before the top was ready, but no matter -- these pizzas are designed to be frozen and then frypan-reheated, so I wasn't too worried about it.

Anyway, then you make your chart with ingredients for each pizza so you don't forget a step on one of them, in the order of ingredients (oil, sauce -- I made a homemade one with San Marzanos -- cheese, garlic, onions, peppers meats, more cheese, mushrooms, olives etc.) and then divide your dough into balls for each pizza, wrapping them all in plastic wrap so they don't dry out, then roll 'em out one at a time, putting the toppings on, shoving them into the oven for 8 minutes or so on broil, turning once halfway, then peeling them out and putting them on cooling racks.

That's it. One by one. Believe it or not, it only took about two hours to make ten pizzas, and nary a misstep.

Cleanup's a bit of a pain, but no sweat. Then you just cut all the pizzas you want to freeze in half and put them in plastic containers between wax paper and they'll stay good for at least three months. Reheat them in a nonstick skillet and they'll taste like they just came out of the oven.

Voilà. Pizza for three months. Next time you're all invited, if you all bring a bottle of wine each.

Salting Cucumbers

I know it seems counterintuitive to salt cucumbers; you really don't want these limp, salty bits of junk in your salad (or sandwich) but believe me, it works.


The point is to draw the water out of the cucumber so that it becomes crunchy, doesn't go limp in ten minutes, and generally makes for a better salad.


So what I did, according to the research I did on the Web, was to first clean and slice the cucumber (I use English cucumbers because they have far fewer seeds than regular) very thin, with a Japanese mandoline, then salt them in a bowl with about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon or regular salt, then put them in a colander above another bowl, and weight them down with a bowl of water (you can use a Ziploc bag -- I just didn't have any).


You wouldn't believe it -- a drop of water comes out of them practically every two seconds. I watched. I counted.


You leave them for an hour or so, then rinse them very briefly and they'll hold up for hours or even days without becoming limp and slimy.

Hard to see, but I have a plastic bowl full of water pressing down on the cucumbers, which are dripping water at a rate of about two drops every four seconds

Try it sometime if you like cucumbers.

Curry Dreams

I don't know what it is with me lately, but I don't eat much during the day. No breakfast at all, very rarely any kind of lunch, and usually a peck at any dinner, restaurant or otherwise.

God, that looks good

But at 6 a.m., the dreams come. Like my sushi dream (below) I had an intense curry dream tonight. I think it was a shrimp curry, but I was making up the recipe, step by step, thinking about just how I was going to do the rice, all the way to sprinkling on the cracked papadams, and as Brigitte says it, "Kusbarah" (Cilantro).

It was as real as if I were in the kitchen actually doing it.

So what did I do? Wake up and heat me up a slice of lousy pizza from the restaurant down the street that we'd ordered the night before.

Okay, formally on my to-do list:

Christ, I could use one now

A Caesar Salad, big, with ALL the trimmings. I might even consider sardines.

Curry, preferably shrimp, with fantastically prepared basmati rice and papadams and a nice sambal-cucumber salad.

Sushi, glorious sushi, the best in the city from god-knows-where.

Smoked salmon on a bagel with cream cheese and capers, as only Brigitte knows how to do it.

Pizza, done my way, not the loser mozzarella-laden-crap you get from the restaurant.

This is the stuff of 6 a.m. dreams. Learn, Flock, what dreams may come.

AND THEN ACT UPON THEM.